Job Site Dice Acquires Recruiting Startup getTalent

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getTalent founder and CEO Abraham Shafi told me that his SuccessFactors-backed startup was just acquired by job site Dice.

With getTalent, customers (who supposedly include Walmart, MTV, and Box) can add a plug-in to their job listings and career pages, allowing visitors to sign up for a “talent community,” where they’ll receive targeted content and listings. Recruiters can also scan résumés and sign people up at job fairs.

Either way, the goal is to keep job candidates engaged with the company even if they’re not the right fit for the current openings, in case something might work out down the line.

Those features seems like a pretty natural fit for a job site. In fact, Shafi said getTalent will continue to operate as a standalone product. IT will also be offered as an additional service to Dice customers who want to more “source leads from all over the Internet” and incorporate “personalized messaging and engagement” into their recruiting efforts. Shafi, meanwhile, will become head of product at Dice, and the entire five-person getTalent team is moving over.

When I last wrote about the startup, Shafi told me that getTalent had raised $2.6 million in funding from HR software maker SuccessFactors (which itself is owned by SAP) and angel investors including Krutal Desai and Ray Wallin. He said today that it reached a point where he was considering raising more money or getting acquired.

When I asked if other companies (like, oh, say, SuccessFactors) had also made acquisition offers, Shafi replied, “I can make a larger impact at Dice, getTalent can make a larger impact at Dice. I can’t publicly say what was offered, but I can say that in my decision-making process that’s what inspired me. … I wouldn’t have done it if this was just another product that was going to be put on the backburner.”

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. I’ve also emailed Dice for confirmation and comment and will update if I hear back.

Update: Dice just sent me the following statement from President Shravan Goli: “We acquired the getTalent product in October. We are pleased to have the team behind getTalent join our Dice.com development team.”

BioAbe is an entrepreneur living in San Francisco, California. He is the founder of the highly acclaimed social recruiting platform getTalent.com.
After leaving Google, he has devoted the majority of his time to understanding how employers and job-seekers interact, and has presented numerous HR Technology Conferences.
In early 2009, he founded getTalent as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley. It started …